Duration: 4:11
A teacher and her students talk about the the benefits they have noticed from using flipped learning in their classroom and the flexibility that it allows.
Student 1: So we use videos on our devices for like maths, writing, mostly reading because we use them for instructions. It’s like cloning our teacher, it’s just so useful.
Sara Lambert: It took a really long time to ask kids to watch a video, understand the main message of the video, and then go away and apply that in their learning. That’s cognitively very demanding. But we worked on it a lot. There was a lot of very explicit teaching that went on in terms of what kinds of behaviours do you need to show when you’re watching a flipped video? What kinds of things can you do yourself to actually indicate whether you understand something or whether you don’t understand something. All of that teaching has really contributed to a big growth in ownership over learning.
One thing that we’ve tried to get learners to understand, is that there are different, we call them individual spaces, and application spaces within the learning process that actually they do need to come back to that. Watching the flipped video is an individual space. That video is tailored for you and tailored for your next steps specifically chosen based on whatever pre learning or assessment has happened before that. So kids are understanding now that actually watching that initial video for the first time, that’s a time for just me to focus on what I have to be doing and my own personal learning goal. When they move through into the application space, we’ve noticed a big change in terms of how busy that time is. They’re actually not just interacting with their group as they traditionally might be because the groups are fluid too. So they are often engaging with a range of different people. They can ask me because I’m moving and accessible within that space, they can ask a buddy who’s got the same flipped video, or they can go back and watch the flipped video.
Student 1: We also use PlayPosits which is a type of flip video so it stops you in the middle to do an activity. You go and watch about one video then the teacher chops it up and then there’s an activity in each video.
Student 2: So that the teacher doesn’t tell you like 20 things and you have to remember them all, you can just get told one thing and then do an activity about it and then get told another thing and do an activity about it.
Student 1: Well if you have done a part of the activity, you can go back and then you can skip back forward but when you haven’t done the activity, if you’re trying to go forward and just skip your learning, you can’t do that. That’s what I think is helpful about it.
Sara Lambert: They really understand that if I don’t know something I can go away and I can learn it. And having that mindset has meant that they pick up on the measure of success a little bit more I think. Because a lot of the time we’re not actually being the ones who are judging whether they’re successful or not, they are. So they’ve got much, much richer discourse happening in the learning process that began from an individually centred model. It’s not a new notion to get kids to say and use the pedagogical terms, or WALTS, or learning intentions and that sort of stuff, that’s been something that teachers have been doing for a long time but this is probably the first time that I actually think that the kids really understand it. They’re not just parroting it, or they’re not just able to say the words, they know what something looks like in their learning and I think for them to have that mindset has been really empowering.